Ontologies for Plant Communities – A New Approach to Knowledge Representation in Vegetation Science

Abstract

Identifying plant communities during field work proves to be a difficult task, especially for beginners or less trained professionals. Although plant communities are well described in the literature, it is difficult to map this knowledge instantly to the situation found in the field. Increasing computational power and the emergence of mobile computing environments suggest that in the near future information can be made available at nearly every place, at least from a technical point of view. However, just transferring the knowledge represented in books into a digital environment without restructuring the knowledge representation (KR) will not improve the possibilities to identify plant communities during field work. In this paper the potential of ontologies to improve the usability of knowledge for field work is investigated.